What do Buyers want from Salespeople?

This is the first episode of the Newsletter “From The Buyer’s Perspective”.

Answering the Newsletter Headline, “How to sell by seeing the world through the buyer’s eyes“, starts by being conscious of what buyers want from salespeople. If you have been following Brent Adamson (ex-Gartner), Anthony Iannarino, Jeb Blount, or if you have been a loyal thesalesadvice follower, you already understand that customers do not want salespeople to play the traditional role of showing up and pitching their products and offering deals. Instead,

Buyers are looking for someone to help them grow their business.

That’s it. That is the bottom line. That’s what customers are interested in. And “growth” comes in all sorts: revenue, costs, profit, customer loyalty, customer experience, market expansion, market development, and diversification.

I am sure you all get this. Click here for more context. But if the customer is looking for that kind of help, the 64 million dollar questions are:

1. What role would the customer want me to play?
2. What skills do I need for that?

What role would the customer want me to play?

Your new role is a 180-degree flip of how you have been selling until now. The customer conversation is not about you, your company or your products. This sounds weird because you probably have spent hundreds of hours understanding your products’ features, advantages and benefits so you can sell them. You have also been trained on what your company stands for, so you want to use that as your credibility. Don’t. Not yet.

What customers want from you is someone who brings fresh perspectives and challenges their thinking. They want you to share business ideas they have not explored yet and customer success stories of how you have helped others.

They also want help with narrowing down options. Most companies have solid visions about what role they want to play for other companies and consumers, but many are struggling with a solid strategy to achieve that vision. There are so many options. Every stakeholder in the buying room has an opinion, and everyone wants to be heard. The budget to invest in growth ideas, however, is limited. Gartner has written numerous times about the challenges and dilemmas faced by top executives.

That’s where you come in. To get you into that boardroom sharing your experience and ideas, you need the right mindset (the 180 flip) and skills no one has trained you on before.

What skills do I need to sell with the buyer’s perspective?

The fundamental skill to learn is understanding where your customer is in their buying process. What does that mean? Every company and every consumer ( including you and me) have a buying clock to guide them when purchasing something. There are hundreds of different buying clocks or processes on the internet. Many are too complicated.

Most B2B businesses are in the buying phase, where everything runs smoothly. I call this ” Service in Place”; other names like “Status Quo” exist. So, it is a situation that most customers strive to be in – it is the end of the whole buying process. Suppliers are chosen for the right reasons: They bring value with their products and services that the company needs to perform and grow. Actually, “Service in Place” is not really a buying phase because no one is looking to buy anything. They are happy with what they have bought and are reaping the benefits of that purchase.

There are four phases customers can find themselves in until they reach “Service in Place”. The skills to learn are to:

1. Recognize these four phases
2. Adapt the Discovery Conversation to these phases

In other words, what you say, the questions you ask, what you try to achieve, and what you want your customer to discover differ in each buying phase.

Once you learn how to control this, you will automatically engage your customers deeper, and they will be keen for more information because your sales process aligns with their buying process. For the buyer, your questions, new perspectives and ideas align with the information they seek. Look at the sales advice Menu to learn more about this skill. You can learn this by yourself. The blogs are all for free.

What’s next?

How can AI help salespeople?

80% of buyers are in Service in Place. With younger business buyers entering senior management roles, Forrester Research predicts that they and GenAI will upend the status quo. As a salesperson, you want to capitalize on that. It’s your turn. Acquire the Selling with the Buyer’s Perspective skills to increase your probability of helping these young business buyers with new business growth ideas.

Prospects are by default in Service in Place. So, becoming an expert in talking to prospects makes all sense. Jeb Blount is the industry leader in prospecting. I recommend that you read his book Fanatical Prospecting. It’s a masterpiece. When prospecting, you often have a limited time window to get the potential buyer’s attention. How do you do that?

The secret is to start with great Situational Knowledge of the customer and their business. And AI can help you gain that knowledge to pick up that phone confidently. I will tell you about that in the next episode:

“My recommended AI prompts for Salespeople”

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